Dancing Horse: Corso Pilota On Ice with a Ferrari FF

Learning to drive a Ferrari in a Winter Wonderland

The absurdity of it made me grin. The road was completely covered in packed snow, with another couple of inches of powder on top, and more was falling. We were miles from nowhere and hadn’t passed an occupied building in at least 30 minutes, and of course I don’t know my way around rural Colorado. Given sufficient foresight, there is a short list of vehicles I’d choose to take on such an excursion. A $330,000 Ferrari wouldn’t have been one of them, and yet, there I was. I didn’t even have chains.

The journey wasn’t as ill-conceived as it seems. I was on the way to a rugged, back-country resort, and there were half a dozen other Ferrari FFs in convoy with me. I’d schmoozed my way into a slot in Ferrari’s Corso Pilota On Ice, otherwise known as its winter driving school, and this was part of the experience.Now in its second year, Corso Pilota On Ice is an owners-only experience offered by Ferrari partly for driver training, partly to offer customers an exclusive experience, and partly to sell FFs. Based on my experience, it succeeds on all counts. A compliment to Ferrari’s popular Corso Pilota high-performance driving school offered in Italy and Canada, Corso Pilota On Ice delivers a similar experience, but with an emphasis on performance driving in low- and no-grip situations.

Like the performance driving experience, Corso Pilota On Ice is a car guy’s dream vacation. You fly to Aspen, Colorado, to spend two nights at the posh Little Nell Resort. The first morning of the program, you’re whisked away to the airport to board a chartered jet for the short flight to Steamboat Springs, the site of your winter playground. There you spend the day driving FFs on two snow-and-ice tracks under the expert guidance of a cadre of professional racecar drivers. Back in Aspen on day two, you load up into a fleet of FFs and drive out to the remote Smith Fork Ranch via some of central Colorado’s best back roads for lunch, then back to Aspen for dinner. The price of this learning experience: $11,300 per driver, $950 per guest, the price of your airfare and the past purchase of a Ferrari, though if you’re in the market but haven’t purchased yet, Ferrari may be willing to bend the rule for you. Programs are held twice a year and limited to 12 students.

While there’s no bad-mouthing champagne receptions, expensive meals, and traveling by private jet, the real experience is, of course, in the driving. To those from wintery states, some of the novelty may be lost, but those of us from the Sun Belt will relish the experience. Those from the snowier part of the country can learn a few tricks too, though.

Unlike an icy road, the challenge of an ice track is its constantly changing grip. True, both are unpredictably slippery, but rarely in the real world do you drive over the exact same place several times in a matter of minutes. Unlike most any other surface you may drive on, the grip properties of snow and ice change every time you drive over them. The friction of the tires and weight of the car alter the temperature of the surface in any condition, but on snow and ice, that can mean the difference between driving on ice, driving on snow or hydroplaning on a thin film of water. The surface is even more susceptible to changes in the weather. It’s something the instructors at Corso Pilota On Ice tell you, but it doesn’t really register until you experience it.It doesn’t sound especially dramatic, but the results can be. The same corner you just rounded without trouble a few minutes ago is suddenly a sheet of ice that sends you sliding into the snowbank, despite the fact that you were traveling the same speed, braked at the same point, and turned the same way as before. It’s when you’re headed for that snowbank at the mercy of friction and physics that you finally understand how dramatically the situation can change, and how quickly.

While the point of the exercise is to teach you how to handle such circumstances, it also has the effect of making you hyper-aware. Once you’ve gone nose-first into the snow, that confidence you gained hanging the tail out a few corners back is nowhere to be found. You eye every corner suspiciously, searching for any visual or inertial cue that the coefficient of grip has changed. By the end of the day, the better drivers will have relaxed once more and will be ready with the fabled “dab of oppo” every time the tires give way. I set a personal goal of drifting the entire track in one shot by the end of the day, and I’m happy to say I achieved it.Pulling it off required a willing companion, and the Ferrari FF fit the bill. Ferrari caught a lot of guff when it launched the FF, its first-ever all-wheel-drive car. Some called it pointless; some called it antithetical to the Ferrari ethos; others just called it ugly. Call it whatever you want, but don’t call it a failure. Ferrari’s unusual all-wheel-drive system does exactly what the automaker promises, and on the ice track, with nothing more than a set of Pirelli winter tires, it delivered.